The
accumulation of capital is the supreme value of capitalists and all
elements of capitalist society--control over resources, labor
relations, fiscal and tax policy, culture and propaganda, the
workings of academia, war, and imperialism--are shaped to satisfy
its hunger

Joel
Kovel, "The Future Will Be Ecosocialist, Because Without
Ecosocialism, There Will Be No Future"

Democracy
and freedom are at the heart of socialism...Humanity needs no condescending
saviors. People can only become truly free through own efforts.

Paul
Le Blanc, "The Third American Revolution: How Socialism Can Come to
the United States"

Imagine
the struggle for freedom in the US without ordinary human beings such
as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. It is not just the passionate
speeches of a fugitive from a brutal and an oppressive ordering of
humanity or the bravery of a determined conductor in the Underground
Railroad. There would be no speech or action without first a
Sojourner or a Harriet recognizing that "freedom," small "f"
for the individual is no Freedom at all in a system that, in itself,
negates the very idea of freedom.

In
the face of their own "escape" from enslavement, both women would
have experienced this painful truth. Painful because both would have
realized their lives could have little meaning if the end goal was to
enjoy the fruits of their individual freedom in the North while so
many remained enslaved. Quite possibly, both Sojourner and Harriet
experienced anger, too. Looking back, seeing before them the faces of
family members, other families, men, women, and children subjected to
the myth of Southern Chivalry, a very real national embrace of white
supremacy, violence at its rawest, neither women opted to shudder of
fear. Neither women could shrug off their anger, nod in acceptance of
the status quo, and cheer their own good fortune. Neither Sojourner
or Harriet succumbed to the distraction of distorted dreams in which
"exceptionalism" mask the sacrificial mechanisms of an un-free
and un-democratic society.

I
got mine. You get yours
is
not the mantra of those who are principled, who are human enough to
feel empathy for the suffering of others.

Beyond
the slogan of individualism ,
Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman imagined a US where all its people
truly free. And to achieve that kind of freedom, they imagined
themselves as committed thinkers and activists in the struggle for a
vision of freedom and democracy for all.

Sojourner
Truth and Harriet Tubman were not alone in their commitment to
freedom for all and rejection of the ideology of individualism. There
were others such as Paul Robeson, Hubert Harrison, and Pauli Murray
who imagined the road to freedom and democracy in a socialist USA.

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We
can make clear what peaceful existence means. It means living in
peace and friendship with another kind of society--a fully
integrated society where the people control their destinies, where
poverty and illiteracy have been eliminated, and where new kinds of
human beings develop in the framework of a new level of social
living.

(Paul
Robeson, Paul
Robeson Speaks )

People
control their destinies! Poverty and illiteracy eliminated! The rise
of a new kind of human being is possible, if we imagine...

To
imagine is to see the possibilities for humanity to live in free and
democratic societies. To imagine is to discuss openly how all human
beings, surrounded by unpolluted air, produce from uncontaminated
soil, food and free flowing and clean water.